As the co-founder of Fashion Revolution, Carry Somers is no stranger to big ideas that shape the future of fashion. Somers’ new book, The Nature of Fashion: A Botanical Story of Our Material Lives, brings together the human stories behind historical plant-based textiles to create a vision for the future. In this extract from the book’s final chapter, she meets the women living in Latin America now who are using long-established natural materials in new ways to inform the future of textile production.
As Threads Spiral On, So Does Tomorrow: These Women Showed Me The Possibilities of Plant-Based Textiles
While our trees gently weep
Peru • 2024
Even as our material world hangs by a thread, it is still holding, repairable if we act swiftly while loose strands remain. All over the world, people are rising to this challenge and doing exactly that. Awarded a Churchill Fellowship, I embarked on a journey through Peru, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico to explore the unfathomable wisdom of plants, interviewing pioneers, guardians, innovators, artists, scientists, and mavericks. Plants offered their own wisdom too, part of an entwined ecosystem upholding each biosphere; nature and humanity as one. This two-ply thread of human and ecological narratives forms the warp and weft of this chapter, helping to reveal how the patterns of past and present might be reimagined for our shared future. The stories in this final chapter are vignettes. Though limited in number, they encapsulate the insights I gathered during a transformative experience immersed in cultures and textile traditions across Latin America.
Peru was the perfect landscape within which to explore the fertile intersection of plant wisdom and cultural traditions. From my very first day, I was immersed in a tapestry of stories that reflected the country’s diverse vegetation and the contradictions and complexities that simmer beneath the surface. I danced on the mountaintops. And I cried alongside my interviewees more than once as they shared traumatic stories from within their communities rarely voiced to outsiders. While these do not find their place in this chapter, which is ultimately a hopeful vision, they are part of the same fabric, their threads running invisibly alongside. The botanical abundance of the land and its rich cultural heritage endure alongside its wounds. It is within this fraught coexistence that these seeds of possibility grow.
I offer these stories as illustrations of our ability to sing a new future into being.
One of my most memorable encounters was with Sadith and Olinda Silvano from the Shipibo-Konibo community of Cantagallo, Lima, not least because they sang constantly while they worked, infusing their designs with meaning. Watching their artistry, I came to understand how restraint can speak volumes when it comes to patterning. Their intricate tracery unites two principal elements: the background colour of the fabric and asymmetrical pattern of plant-based resin that draws upon elemental pathways in their mythical past. This is not about inventing something entirely new, although that does happen, but about channelling something timeless and universal. The artist envisions pre-existing patterns, overlaying them onto the fabric and shaping them to harmonise with its form. Any unmatched portions seem to dissolve into invisibility, leaving a design that transcends the textile itself. This is more than a pattern; it is a portal, a glimpse into the universe’s vast, interconnected web. Through the mirror-like balance of Shipibo-Konibo textiles, I observed how minimal elements can tell the most complex of stories. It is within the lattice of interconnected parts that clarity and meaning emerge.
Inspired by my visit to Cantagallo, I offer these final stories as illustrations of our ability to sing a new future into being. Through their symmetry, I hope they weave a coherent whole, a pattern of hope and a vision of renewal, drawn from the threads of what once was, what is, and what one day could be.
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What existed before can be reborn
Guatemala • 2024
This guiding philosophy animates the work of Olga Reiche. I had admired her work for decades, even writing about her in my masters dissertation back in 1990. But nothing could have prepared me for the fascinating world to which she introduced me, one where corn silk, dental floss and leftover tortillas become materials for artistic reinvention.
Olga's world is one where corn silk, dental floss, and leftover tortillas become materials for artistic reinvention.
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For thirty-five years, Olga has been working to resurrect the art of natural dyeing, breathing vibrant life back into a tradition that nearly vanished from Guatemala. Many believed natural colours could never be resuscitated; some say this still, and not without reason. Olga herself admits that despite her tireless efforts, natural dye practice has been a failure, even in groups where her training was initially well received. Leaders stray from environmentally friendly methods, workers fail to follow instructions, and market stalls still overflow with synthetic fibres and Azo dyes, synthetic colourants with significant environmental and health risks. “And Chichicastenango?” I ask, my mind flashing back to the colourful photographs I took three decades ago. Olga’s response saddens me: the largest market in Central America has lost much of its charm, now cluttered with a lot of junk. Yet Olga perseveres, driven by an unswerving passion for hand-weaving and natural dyes.
Olga is no stranger to innovation; it’s what she’s been doing ever since she opened her shop Indigo in Antigua in 1987 to support the widows of Guatemala’s civil war. But the fibres on her loom when I visit are something entirely different, pushing the boundaries of craft even further. This time, she isn’t just rediscovering ancient techniques; she is transforming the unexpected. I have to say I never imagined dental floss would find a place in this book, but of course, this is Olga Reiche, experimenter supreme. It all started, as many of Olga’s stories do, with a chance encounter. A woman giving up her eco-business offered Olga hundreds of small pots of corn-based dental floss. Many would consider this a thread too far, no matter how many chicharrones you eat, but Olga saw these pots as treasure troves of potential. Twelve of those spools have already been used by Sabina, a young artisan from the community, who sits working on a backstrap loom. Olga enthuses about the fibre’s possibilities. “Look!” she says, indicating a curl with a soft coral sheen. “It dyes beautifully.” She’s right. Laurel and cochineal coax radiant pinks, fustic produces a golden yellow, while palo de vida is glossy as a conker newly released from its spiky shell.
But corn’s role in textile production doesn’t end there. The weavers of Antigua often work with single-ply cotton, a fragile fibre prone to breaking on the loom. Here, families consume countless tortillas, some of which invariably remain at the end of the day. By morning they are crisp and dry—many would simply throw them away. Not Olga. Through experimentation she discovered that soaking old tortillas in water produces a gummy liquid. When you add cotton threads to this mixture, they grow strong and supple, easier to weave. As if these aren’t sufficient examples of corn’s transformative power, Olga found silk drawn from corn husks produces a dye.
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I learnt so much from Olga, and not just about corn. We delved into the use of tannin-rich plants in the dye process, including the trunk of the banana plant, which is cut down as soon as the fruit are harvested. Use it quickly and it fixes the colour without altering the shade; leave it too long, as most people do, and the fibres take on a brownish hue. Naturally, we also discussed indigo, Olga’s favourite pigment and the name of her shop, which is filled with the most exquisite weavings, as you’d expect.
Every discarded object, every overlooked material, holds the potential for revival.
Olga’s work embodies a belief in second chances, not only for traditions and materials but for communities and ecosystems. Every discarded object, every overlooked material, holds the potential for revival. In her hands, even the mundane becomes magical. What existed before can indeed be reborn, not as a shadow of its former self, but as something entirely new and full of possibility.
